The concept is to combine programming with physical objects, concentrating on sensor input and movement as output. It’s important that we incorporate our weavingcodes research process, so deliberately setting goals we don’t yet know the answers to.

The weaving focus allows us to ground the workshop in loom technology and demonstrate the challenges of manipulating thread, with its enormous history of technological development. For the first Cornwall workshop, Ellen started us off with an introduction using FoAM Kernow’s Harris loom and the fundamentals of weaving. We were also joined by Janet and Jon from lovebytes who are helping us to run these events. When first talking about possible workshops with children, we’d discussed the impossibility of making a functional loom in a couple of hours with only broken toys and lego – and so the focus on tangling was suggested by Alex as a way to turn these difficulties to an advantage. Similarly we created a series of prizes for different categories such as “Most technical effort with least impressive result” – inspired by hebocon events.

The workshop format we used is also influenced by Paul Granjon’s wrekshops – wherever possible we’re recycling by pulling apart e-waste, making use of electronics, motors, gears and ideas from the surprising complexity of what’s inside things people are throwing away. This turned out have a powerful implicit message about recycling, parents I talked to had tried taking things apart to learn about them, but the next step – making use of the parts discovered as we were doing here, needs a bit more help to do.

Also as normal for FoAM projects was the importance of the food, in this case tangled by Amber and Francesca to both provide sustenance and inspiration with cardamom knots, spiralised courgetti and tangle fritters.

The groups ended up a bit lopsided, so in future we plan to pre-arrange them as we did on the machine wilderness workshop. In order to do that we need to ask for more information from participants beforehand such as family ages and backgrounds.

We tried using the small Pi touchscreens – these were a bit too fiddly to get away without a mouse, but are much less oppressive somehow than larger PC monitors – as they are so small, they became incorporated into the tanglebots themselves.

Crocodile clips were the best way to connect to random/plundered electronics as well as the lego motors. These removed the need for soldering (which we had set up anyway, but in a separate space).

Instead of using my cobbled together homemade interface board, we’re using the pimoroni explorer hat (pro). This comes with some nice features, especially a built in breadboard but also 8 touch buttons, 4 LEDs and two motor drivers. The only downside is that it uses the same power source as the Pi for the motors, so you need to be a little careful as it can reset the Pi if the power draw is too great.

We have a good stock of recycled e-waste robotic toys we’re going to be using to build with (along with some secondhand lego mindstorms):

In order to keep the workshop balanced between programming and building, and fun for all age groups, we want to use Scratch – rather than getting bogged down with python or similar. In a big improvement to previous versions of the Pi OS, the recent raspbian version (jessie) supports lots of extension hardware including the explorer hat. Things like firing the built in LEDs work ‘out of the box’ like this:

While the two motor controllers (with speed control!) work like this:

The touch buttons were a bit harder to get working as they are not supported by default, so I had to write a scratch driver to do this which you can find here. Once the driver script is running (which launches automatically from the desktop icon), it communicates to scratch over the network and registers the 8 touch buttons as sensors. This means they can be accessed in scratch like so:

A new project begins, on the subject of ecology and evolution of infectious disease. This one is a little different from a lot of Foam Kernow’s citizen science projects in that the subject is theoretical research – and involves mathematical simulations of populations of co-evolving organisms, rather than the direct study of real ones in field sites etc.

The simulation, or model, we are working with is concerned with the co-evolution of parasites and their hosts. Just as in more commonly known simulations of predators and prey, there are complex relationships between hosts and parasites – for example if parasites become too successful and aggressive the hosts start to die out, in turn reducing the parasite populations. Hosts can evolve to resist infection, but this has an overhead that starts to become a disadvantage when most of a population is free of parasites again.

Example evolution processes with different host/parasite trade-offs.

Over time these relationships shift and change, and this happens in different patterns depending on the starting conditions. Little is known about the categorisation of these patterns, or even the range of relationships possible. The models used to simulate them are still a research topic in their own right, so in this project we are hoping to explore different ways people can both control a simulation (perhaps with an element of visual live programming), and also experience the results in a number of ways – via a sonifications, or game world. The eventual, ambitious aim – is to provide a way for people to feedback their discoveries into the research.

As we have so little idea what the Inca are telling us in their Quipu, it seems appropriate to add a cryptanalysis approach to our toolkit of inquiry. One of the first things that a cryptanalyst will do when inspecting an unknown system is to visualise it’s entropy in order to get a handle on any structures or patterns in the underlying information. This concept comes from Claude Shannon’s work on information theory in the 40’s, where he proved that information obeys fundamental laws of physics. The concept that information and “cyberspace” may not be as intangible and otherworldly as we might believe (in fact is grounded in physical reality along with everything else) is one of the recurring themes of the weavingcodes project.

Shannon’s innovation was to separate the concepts of data quantity from information value, and he claims that information is equivalent to surprise – the more surprising a piece of data is, the more information it contains. Conversely a piece of information which we expect to hear by definition doesn’t really tell us very much. The potential for some data to be surprising (or more specifically it’s potential to reduce our uncertainty) can be measured statistically, with a quantity he called entropy, as it is analogous to states in thermodynamic systems.

Shannon defined a generalised communication system, which is handy to give us a way of reasoning about our situation in relation to the Inca. Our main unknown is the source of the messages they are sending us, are they accounting information, calendars or stories? We know a bit more about the transmitters of the messages, the khipukamayuq – the knot makers and quipu keepers. At the time Shannon was working on information theory, he was part of the start of the movement away from analogue, continuous signals and towards digital signals – with advantages that they are highly resistant to noise and can be carried further and combined together to increase bandwidth. Quipu are also mainly comprised of digital information – the type of a knot, the number of turns it’s comprised of or the twist direction of a thread are all discreet (either one thing or another) and therefore highly robust to material decay or decomposition. We can still ‘read’ them confidently after 500 years or more without the digital signal they represent being degraded too badly, if only we could understand it. At the same time, none of us working on this have access to a real quipu, so our receivers are the archaeologists and historians who study them, and compile archives such as the Harvard Quipu Archive we are using.

Although entropy is a very simplistic approach mathematically, it’s main use is to give us a tool for measuring the comparative information carrying potential of data which we have no idea about. Here are all the quipu in the Harvard database in order of average entropy bits they contain (only listing every other quipu ID):

This graph is calculated by making lists of all the discreet data of the same type, e.g. knot value, type, tying direction, pendant colours and ply direction (ignoring lengths and knot positions as these are continuous) – then calculating Shannon entropy on histograms for each one and adding them together.

We can also compare different types of information against one another, for example the main data we currently understand has some specific meaning are the knot values, partly derived from the knot type (long, single or figure of eight), which represent a decimal notation. If we compare the entropy of these we can expect them to have roughly similar average amounts of information:

The meanings of colours, ply and structure are largely unknown. Here are the knot values compared with the colours:

And this is pendant ply direction compared with knot values for each quipu:

At this point the most useful aspect of this work is to give us some outliers to inspect visually and sonically – more on that soon.

Busy times at Foam Kernow, here are some photos from the Machine Wilderness Workshop weekend before last. This was a project between Foam Amsterdam and us, with 30 participants from all over the place geographically and professionally. My role was as facilitator, so mainly obtaining raw materials (electronic toys, recycled trash and e-waste) as well as a bit of cooking and general running around which I found very enjoyable. The machines invented and prototyped were grounded in the environment of the Penryn river in Cornwall, so common themes were seaweed biomimicry and experiments with estuarine mud, both as a surprisingly rich power source as well as a design medium in it’s own right.

I’ll leave the in-depth write ups to those leading the event, but one of my interests was to see how a workshop involving e-waste would work, practically and as an inspiration – with an eye to doing this with primary school kids and teachers. We managed to locate a good quantity of old toys from various local second hand stores and warehouses, quite a modest outlay in return for some very good mechanics, motors and electronic parts. Resisting the temptation to take them to bits beforehand meant that the participants could open them up and discover what they could use, one of the best items was a bubble machine – inside was a good air pump and lots of mechanics (total cost ~£1.50). This was incorporated into a robot lifeform that was in part augmented by moss growth and LED lights.

We recently had the second inset training day in programming related activities at Truro school. Following on from the previous session I didn’t want to introduce too much new stuff, so we concentrated on going back over Sonic Pi and Minecraft/Python programming in the morning, then discussed a lot more about our future workshops in the afternoon. These will include children from most of the primary schools in the Truro area and take place during the next term. I also wanted to use the day to work on some specific ideas the teachers wanted to get going. One of these involved running a Kinect camera with the Pi, which we managed to get more or less working – reading depth data in Python for potentially plugging into Minecraft at a later date.

The big idea I wanted to get feedback about was the use of robotics and electronics in conjunction with code (the photo above is my desk while preparing the day before). I didn’t have any lesson plans for this, but based on some comments from the first workshop and from playing a bit with this during CodeClub teaching I felt it might be good with this age group, who already know quite a bit about screen based activities. To keep costs down (as well as building in issues like e-waste) we’re planning to make use of recycled junk to extract motors from toys and hack them to do different things. It seems this doesn’t cause too many issues from safety POV (everything will be low-voltage and we can check everything beforehand), even the use of soldering irons seems to be acceptable as they have supervision.

The advantage of using code to move real things (as shown by a long history) is that it directly connects programming with the world outside of the screen (where it most certainly now has great importance in our lives), and at the same time results in teamwork – as it’s not easy for a single person to make a robot while programming it. When we tried this at Troon Primary they self organised into a group with one person programming while another was building stuff in lego and a third provided excited communication between them and more or less managed the task. Other programming activities tend to be more individualistic – with the possible exception of networked Minecraft, which is important but a very different form of collaboration.

Last week I had the chance to help out the Raspberry Pi foundation at their Picademy in Exeter. It was good to meet up with Sam Aaron again to talk livecoding on Pis, and also see how they run these events. They are designed for local teachers to get more confident with computers, programming and electronics to the point where they can start designing their own teaching materials on the second day of the two day course. This is a model I’m intending to use for the second inset teacher training day I’m doing next week at Truro school – it’s pretty exciting to see the ideas that they have for activities for their pupils, and a good challenge to help find ways to bring them into existence in a day.

We also had the ending of Future Thinking for Social Living at the Miners Court summer party last week. We exhibited the map made during the workshops, made lots of tea, and had some fun with the pattern matrix in musical mode out in the garden – I adapted Alex’s music system we used with Ellen in Munich to run on Raspberry Pi so it didn’t require a laptop, or a screen at all – simply a speaker. It was interesting how quickly people got the idea, in many ways music is easier to explain than weaving as listening while coding is multi-sensory.

This week I’m teaching at IMM Düsseldorf with Julian Rohrhuber which has given me a chance to follow up a bit on Inca Quipu coding with knots, a dangling thread from the weavecoding project. Quipu are how the Incas organised their society, as they had no written texts or money – things like exchanges (for example from their extensive store houses) were recorded via knots. Researchers have been able to decode the basic numeric system they used, but 20% of the quipu seem to follow a different set of rules, along with extra information encoded via thread material, twist direction, colour and other knot differences. I’ve written a python program for converting the Khipu Database Project excel charts into graphviz files for visualising:

The knots are described in ascii art, with S and Z relating to the ply and knot ‘handedness’ direction they are tied in:

The pendant nodes also have labels describing their ply direction and the side the attach on, so “S R” is S ply & recto attached.

The hardest part of this has been a bit of more recent media archeology to figure out the colour values, I’ve had to cross reference the original Ascher-Ascher Quipu Databooks published in 1978 which contain their own colour system which more or less maps to the NBS-ISCC Munsell colour chart originally proposed in 1898. Luckily that site provides hex colour values – hopefully they are vaguely accurate, the current lookup table is here:

This research project aims to look at the relationship between wellbeing, home, making and technology and is centred on Miners Court, who provide assisted housing in Redruth in Cornwall. As well as a range of flats and accommodation, the residents have shared communal areas with a variety of activities throughout the week. Along with Christiane Berghoff, Robin Hawes and Lucie Hernandez we set up camp with a lot of materials for knitting, crochet and weaving as well as some Raspberry Pis and the all new pattern matrix tangible weavecoding device.

The Future Thinking for Social Living project is set up to research how we can think more critically about home and community, and with particular focus on the future. From discussions with the staff at Miners Court – specific issues they are interested in are how to make better use of communal spaces, and how can they get more men involved with crafts and shared activities.

I’m also interested in how we can use these settings for artists residencies – how does working with people like this affect a design process, does working in such a place – and using it as way to start conversations (rather than being too much in ‘teacher mode’) affect the people living there positively? Also the weavecoding project provides some ideas in bridging gaps, both between technology and people – but also across gender gaps, mixing textiles with electronics for example.

Here is the new magnetic pattern matrix, running the 3D Raspberry Pi warp weighted loom simulation (more on this soon!) with a nice 4 shaft loom in the background.

On Monday and Tuesday we spent a long time talking, weaving, knitting and making cups of tea of course (and a bit of time debugging magnets on my part). I’ve found helping people weave with tablets on the inkle loom is a good way to get talking, as this seems new to even people who are experienced with crafts. It also appeals to people with mathematics or design background who normally are uninterested in knitting and other crafts, and seems gender neutral perhaps for the same reasons. It also helps to talk about the history of what we are weaving with, the fact that this is an ancient technique and yet there are so many surprises – I can’t really predict to them what will happen e.g. to the pattern when we change rotation direction, and this seems to be important.

What we have yet to do (but a few weeks to experiment yet) is bridge the technology gap. Many of them have an immediate reaction of distaste to computers, as most of them have them but report that they have become unusable or feel that they are not designed well with their needs in mind. Partly the situation of having some circuit boards getting tangled up in the more familiar materials and using the Raspberry Pi simulation to show what is happening on the loom next to it is a start. One interesting thing is that neither the Pi nor the AVR boards look enough like ‘a computer’ for it to stand out too much (which also part of the Pi’s role in the classroom) – this was more so after plugging it into their large TV and getting rid of the monitor. As it gradually gets into a working state, I’d like to first try using it to demonstrate well known weaves – e.g. plain, twill and satin.

Working in this environment on the pattern matrix between weaving with different people has already had an effect on it’s design process. One initial observation resulted in reducing the magnet strength – I hadn’t even considered before that having them snap together too forcefully would be a problem for some people. Such things are obvious in these kinds of settings.

The main change this time was that for the 20 11-16 year old participants we doubled our teachers to 4 (Glen Pike, Francesca Sargent and Matthew Dodkins and me), plus a couple of interested parents helped us out too. This meant that the day was much more relaxed and we noticed they were engaged with the programming for a much higher proportion of the time. Another factor was that we went straight into coding, as none of them needed introduction to minecraft this year. I think one of the biggest strengths of this kind of learning is that they are able to easily switch between playful interaction (jumping into each other’s worlds, building stuff the normal way) and programming. This means there is low pressure which I think makes it more of a self driven activity, as well as making a long (4 hour) workshop possible.

Here are some screenshots of their creations – this was a melon palace created in a world that had somehow become sliced apart:

Inside the melon palace, the waterfall pulsed with a while loop and sleeps that altered the water source blocks.

As last year there was a lot of mixing of activities, using code to create big shapes and then editing them manually for the finer details:

Here, a huge block of water inexplicably cuts through the scenery:

And two houses, that became merged together and then filled with bookshelves and other homely items: